Georgia is being rocked by allegations of cheating on the state tests. Half the schools in Atlanta are under suspicion because the test papers in those schools had more erasures on them than was usual in the rest of the state.

“Erasure analysis,” as it is known, is a good reason to look closely at the test papers from individual schools, because we know that some dishonest teachers and administrators have erased wrong answers and replaced them with right answers.

Unfortunately, the conversation in Georgia has gotten way ahead of itself by treating higher-than-average erasures as evidence that teachers and administrators must have systematically cheated. Certainly that is one possible explanation, but another is that kids in the high-erasure schools are taught to review their tests carefully and change answers after they think about the questions more.

Before jumping on the “Atlanta must be cheating” bandwagon, it might be worth looking at another source of information about how the city is doing academically.

Every two years, the U.S. Department of Education administers the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to a randomly selected sample of fourth and eighth-graders in both reading and math. NAEP is virtually impossible to cheat on because no one has advance copies, and it is not just a bubble-sheet test. It has a lot of questions where students have to write out their answers and show their work. Besides, it is administered by contractors independently engaged by the feds, not by school districts. Also, there are no stakes attached to NAEP test results: No one gets a bonus because of NAEP results, nor do people get fired.

Eleven cities have agreed to be “oversampled” so that we can see how they are doing in relation to their state. Atlanta is one of these cities.

And sure enough, just as on the state tests, Atlanta has been improving faster than the rest of the state.

By the way, that doesn’t mean that Atlanta is doing well just yet. It is still below the national average for the other cities that participate, and it is still well below the rest of Georgia. What it does mean is that Atlanta appears to have a better handle than many other districts on how to improve.

The charts below show the improvement Atlanta has been making relative to the rest of Georgia on NAEP.

So I’m hoping state officials use the erasure analysis to identify schools that they will send additional test monitors to for the next round of state testing.But if they don’t find evidence of widespread cheating, I hope we can start studying Atlanta for what might be important lessons in how to improve instruction.